How to use FTP to upload files to WordPress for Beginners

Are you looking to learn how to use FTP to upload files on your WordPress website? FTP or file transfer protocol is a fast and simple way to upload files from your computer to your website. In this article, we will show you how to use FTP to upload files to WordPress.

Video Tutorial

Subscribe to WPBeginner

If you don’t like video tutorials or want to move at your own pace, then continue reading the instructions below.

What is FTP?

FTP is short for File transfer protocol. It allows you to transfer files from your computer to your website hosting account.

Now you might be thinking there is already a media uploader inside the WordPress admin area for uploading files like images, video, audio, PDF and more.

Why do you need FTP?

You need FTP to be able to manually upload files in WordPress that sometimes won’t work due to an error on your site.

Normally, you don’t need FTP to upload files at all. You can easily upload images from WordPress admin area. You can even upload plugins and themes from WordPress itself.

For the sake of this tutorial, we will be using FileZilla. You can use any other FTP client that you like. The basic concepts are the same regardless of the software you use.

Connecting To Your WordPress Site Using FTP

When you open your FTP software, it will ask you to connect to your website using your FTP login credentials.

Your FTP login credentials are sent to you via email when you sign up for your WordPress hosting account. You can also find your FTP account information in your hosting account’s cPanel dashboard.

If you cannot find the login credentials, then you can contact your hosting provider to get this information.

Once you have the login information, you need to open FileZilla and then go to File » Site Manager.

This will bring up a pop up window where you can add your website information. Click on the ‘New Site’ button and provide a title for your website.

In the next column, you will be asked to enter your host. This is usually your domain name.

Note: In the protocol section, you should select SFTP if your hosting provider supports it.

Under the logon type field, select ‘Normal’ and then enter your FTP username and password.

Now you can click on the connect button to continue. FileZilla will save your website settings for future logins and open a new FTP connection to your website.

If this is your first time connecting to your website from this computer, then FileZilla may show you a certificate popup.

Check the box next to ‘Always trust certificate for future sessions’ and click on the OK button to continue.

FileZilla will now attempt to login to your website using the credentials you entered. Once connected, you will see the list of files and folders on your website under the ‘Remote site’ column.

The remote site column displays files and folders on your website and the ‘Local site’ section shows files on your computer.

You can browse Local site to locate the files on your computer that you want to upload to your website. Next, you need to right click the file and select upload from the menu.

FileZilla will now transfer the file from your computer to your WordPress site.

However, WordPress needs certain files and folders in specific locations to work properly. This means you cannot just upload a file anywhere. You need to know where to upload a file in your WordPress site.

For example, if you want to manually upload a plugin to your WordPress website. Then first you will need to download the plugin to your computer.

After that you will need to unzip the plugin file. Inside the zip file, you will find the plugin folder. WordPress looks for plugins in the /wp-content/plugins/ folder.

You will first need to go to /wp-content/plugins/ folder in the Remote site column. After that you can upload the plugin folder from your computer to your website.

Once you have uploaded the plugin, you need to visit the plugins page inside your WordPress admin area to activate the plugin.

Similarly, if you wanted to upload a premium theme to your website, you will first download and unzip the theme folder on your computer. After that, you can upload it to /wp-content/themes/ folder on your website.

FTP is not just used to upload files from your computer to your WordPress website. It can also be used to download files from your website and edit them.

Simply right-click on the files or folders you want to download under the ‘Remote Site’ column and click on the download button.

However, keep in mind that this is just the backup of your WordPress files, and it doesn’t include your content (Database). If you want to backup content as well, then you can do so by creating a manual backup of your WordPress database.

We hope this article helped you learn how to use FTP to upload files to WordPress. You may also want to see our step by step WordPress security guide for beginners.

Our audiences are beginners and we didn’t want to confuse them with the jargon. We feel that many FTP clients support FTP over TLS and many hosting providers support it as well. But you are right, we should have mentioned that users should select SFTP when available. We have updated the article to let users know that it’s best to use SFTP when possible.

I recently built WordPress site on xampp server for my company which have its own data center.They want the site to be hosted on windows server 2012 in this data center by buying domain name from ISP.So,can you please guide me how to do this.Thanks in advance and a really appreciation all your tutorials and efforts.

thanks for this excellent video, I would like to ask you about videos, what happened if you have a video that you cannot uploaded from wordpress and instead you need to use FTP (where is the Media folder) to drop this file?

Your voice is clear. You delivery, for me. a beginner, was so fast -along with your speed of mouse movement, your presentation became- because of the speed – was impossible for me to follow. Is there a way for me to slow down your Delivery?
Sincerely,
David

Hi, I locked myself out of my site after I changed the url’s when attempting to move from ,wp, sub directory to public_html for live site. If I have a back-up of before I altered the home and site url’s can I upload it using ftp, or do I need to make changes in phpmyadmin first? Thankyou in advance.

So everything is perfect when i use the Edit tool but as soon as I publish, there are no spaces between paragraphs. I tried looking for the Editor in Appearance but my WP Admin page does not have that feature. How do I fix this?

Hello this is a really great tutorial; but i have a question, i dont have much experience, so im trying to set the winSCP, but it gave me this error message conecting to (my host name) acces denied, and ask me to put the pasword again, if some one can help me i will be really happy.

Please help me. After editing the functions.php of my site, this appeared: Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘<' in /home/carljohn/public_html/wp/wp-content/themes/blog-start/functions.php on line 83. How will I resolve this problem?

Hi!!
Hmm… So I’m new at this whole FTP programs thing.. And as I have to completely change and update my company’s website, I wanted to use the domain but switch everything else to WordPress… Do you have any tutorial about this switch?
Thank you!

Just signed up to WordPress, but unfortunately I have not received an email yet telling me the ftp details. Where can I request them? Is it possible to upload an entire website to WordPress? Thanks for ur help…

Your WordPress server is the computer where your WordPress site is stored by your web hosting company. An FTP client allows you to connect to that computer and upload or download files. Please contact your web hosting service provider for your FTP login credentials.

Thank You!! This was very useful info & saved a lot of time in restoring the corrupt php file and now my website is up and running again…. saved me a great amount of time in redoing hell lot of development……. I appreciate you.

I am a new webmaster, and was sent Login Info for WordPress and the FTP.
There was also a link and so I clicked on the link and it sent me to a login dialog box. I entered the login info and password then nothing happened. Why???

Thank god for you guys! I got no help from my theme provider, or wordpress.org to fix my problem I locked myself out with Error 500 editing functions.php file and you nailed it down for me!!! Hours spent previously trying to figure out what to do and you saved the day—- YOU ROCK

Can you tell me if I can use wordpress.org as a store? I have a dropship company that can give me FTP files of their products and upload to a website. I have to build a new website so maybe wordpress.org??

I have purchased my domain from wordpress itself. Now, I am trying to migrate from wordpress.com to wordpress.org. I do not find any control panel in my wordpress account. How do I do it? I am already going through your tutorial on http://www.wpbeginner.com/how-to-install-wordpress/#installftp, but am not sure which is suitable. Please suggest.

I installed WordPress via FTP client , But i want to upload another ready to host website in zipped format in which i want to make changes in like i want to change the banners & affiliate links to my own. How can i do the same?. Because i did upload it but could not edit it after that. Can you please help me with this?. Thanks a lot

Thank you for this. I was locked out of my site yesterday when I edited my functions.php file. After freaking out, taking a deep breath (as instructed by one of your articles), laughing from nervousness, trying a few things and eventually taking time of to clear my head, I finally managed. Took me a couple of minutes.

Thank you for your help! This and related posts helped me get through my coding error without freaking out too much. For some reason, my website is still messed up (I didn’t have the functions.php saved, so I just removed the bad code and saved the rest to access my website as admin), but at least it’s not entirely inaccessible!

I locked myself out of my WordPress after I put a code snippet to the function.php file. I know where the error is. I do not have a backup of my files of my website (my computer recently crashed). Can I still enter the function.php somehow and remove the code?
Or does my hosting company have access to those files?

These values will be provided by your web hosting provider when you set up your account. You can also get these details from your web hosting control panel. The hostname is your server’s location, and username and password are your FTP login credentials.

The important things missed in this tutorial are:
What are the host ftp, username, password and port number to be used with Word Press.
Without these information, FileZilla can not transfer your files.
Large file transfer presents a problem. Usually the server will cut off the transfer if your files would take to long time to transfer. To reduce the size of your file, you have to apply some file compressor program before you use FTP. For example the video files are usually very large and need to be compressed before you can use FTP to transfer them.

You are not supposed to be editing the core WordPress files. You can edit your posts and pages using WordPress admin area. Or if you want to change something in your theme then you can do that in Appearance -> Customize section.

If you still must edit the files using FTP then first make sure that you have a complete backup of your WordPress site.

So I dl’d FileZilla but I’m confused about the ‘host’. All I did was hop onto WordPress.com and started my blog, but I don’t have any of the initial emails because I did it a while ago. Is wordpress my host? Or are people using other parties to “host” their sites?

I am still confused. I logged into FTP but now I am trying to fix the problem. What happened is I tried to put an ad from google adsense into a different sidebar by putting code into my website. That created a syntax error and now I am locked out.

This website says you can delete a file and hopefully you saved the original. But I didn’t save an original so what do I do. How do I find the spot where I put the code and be able to just delete that select area out so I can get my site back?

Wampserver is used to test WordPress on your local windows PC. You do not really need an FTP client to copy paste files in WampServer. You can just go to the /www/ directory in WAMP install folder and paste WordPress files there. See our guide on how to install WordPress using WAMP.

I have a webcam and software and I want to ftp images directly to my wordpress site. I can successfully upload them to /mysite/wp-content/uploads but they don’t show in the Media folder. What am I doing wrong?

Files uploaded directly to the uploads folder are not actually uploaded by WordPress so it doesn’t recognize them. When you upload a file using WordPress media uploader, WordPress generates thumbnails for the file, stores file name, and allows you to even store additional details. Manually uploaded files do not go through this process so WordPress has no thumbnails for them and has no record of them in the database.

I found this article while looking up how to use a ftp to edit WP files. This makes sense but what I really want is to figure out how to update my theme without losing my changed options and editted css files.

My theme creator says, ” please install the zipped theme file in the regular way on your wp admin. Then go to your ftp and change the language files if you need. Or unzip the theme and copy-paste your language files, then zip it with WinRAR. Finally install and activate via your admin.”

So I have installed the new theme but when I activate it all of the options reset to default and my edited css is gone. I’ve searched through your site for an article on this subject but I can’t find anything on updating themes without losing edits.

Ben once you have uploaded your theme to your website and activated it, you can then edit individual files using FTP. For example after uploading and activating your theme you can download style.css file to your computer make changes to it and upload it back to your server. The FTP client will tell you that a file with the same name already exists what do you want to do? Click on onverwrite and this should work.

Thanks for choosing to leave a comment. Please keep in mind that all comments are moderated according to our comment policy, and your email address will NOT be published. Please Do NOT use keywords in the name field. Let's have a personal and meaningful conversation.

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. You can also subscribe without commenting.

WPBeginner is a free WordPress resource site for Beginners. WPBeginner was founded in July 2009 by Syed Balkhi. The main goal of this site is to provide quality tips, tricks, hacks, and other WordPress resources that allows WordPress beginners to improve their site(s).